She knew what it meant. She’d lived all her life in a slave fort. Captain Jackson was trying to sell them to these men. She tried to run and get help – from where? from whom? – but the bald man caught her. Her mother asked them to take her, only please, leave the girl, but they ignored her. The bald one’s fingers were rough. He touched Cinnamon’s skull and her teeth, put his fingers inside her ears, felt her arms, her legs, her breasts, her secret part.
After that they sat and talked, negotiating. At the end, they shook hands, and the flaxen one said: ‘We’ll try them here.’
Cinnamon’s voice was a perfect facsimile of Frank Drake’s Deptford twang. It made me wince.
‘Can’t you do that on the boat?’ A clipped voice, haughty, not unlike my own. Captain Jackson.
‘The young one’s personal for Evan Vaughan. He don’t like to share. Join us if you like?’
‘God, no.’
She cried out to the captain to come back, not to leave her alone with these men. He had dined at their table, and Papa had promoted him. He looked at her oddly, not with hatred or dislike, but as though she had ceased to hold any significance for him at all.
Cinnamon’s voice grew halting at this point, as if her memories were scattered and blurred. ‘Flaxen hair forced Mama to her knees. I was in the bed where Papa had died. I was naked, and so was the bald man, who told me to call him Mr Grimshaw. I stared out of the window at a fragment of sky. The men swapped round. Mr Grimshaw wanted me to like him, but the Flaxen Devil was rougher.’
Later, still bleeding, they had been hustled out of the apartment, into the sunshine, forced across the yard, under the eyes of the men who had served under her father’s command. The soldiers watched without much interest, slapping the flies from their sunburned necks.
‘Grimshaw and the Flaxen Devil pushed us into a canoe. The Flaxen Devil rowed. Grimshaw whistled a tune. I gazed back at the shore. The fort was dazzling, ochre and white. A line of village children ran along the beach. Then I looked up, and saw her.’ She shivered. ‘The winged woman staring down at me. She was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen. We were hoisted up on deck, where a long-faced man told me to take off my clothes again. I tried to jump off the ship, but they pulled me back. The long-faced man had a stove on deck, with many slave brands heating there. He pressed one into my skin. It took me a long time to stop screaming after that.’
She pulled down her shift, so I could see the crown and crescent moon seared into her shoulder. Then she described the conditions on board the slave ship. The dark, fetid decks, hot as an oven when it was calm. The shit, the blood, the filth. The shackles chafing the skin. The sweltering, sleepless nights, the hold echoing with moans and sobs and the clanking of fetters, the unforgiving wood against her naked skin.
‘When at last we put to sea, I desired nothing but to die. The ship bucked and rolled in storms and tropical tempests. We slid along the decks, pulled back and forth by our chains, lubricated by the filth and vomit of other slaves. Some died, and their corpses were thrown overboard. Sometimes I was cleaned and taken to the captain’s quarters, to be used for his pleasure. He didn’t speak, except to tell me he would kill me if I disobeyed him. He said he owned me now. He enjoyed saying that.
‘Once a day we were brought up on deck. We were washed, and our chains were inspected. The food was served in tubs. Beans and yams, a little meat. Water we lived for. I held it in my hands, and it sparkled like crystal. Sometimes we were made to dance. The crew liked that part. The Flaxen Devil carried a whip, and he liked to use it on the women if they didn’t dance fast enough.’
She trailed off, staring into the hell of her past, before beginning again.
‘At night, Mama and I clung to one another, and she would whisper of the vengeance the obeah gods had planned for these men. One day, when the Flaxen Devil was down in the hold, Mama cursed him. She called down the wrath of our ancestors, the priests who walked the path of bones. She asked them to punish this man who had raped her daughter. Then she made a grab for the Flaxen Devil’s knife. She would have killed him, I think, had the cabin boy not grabbed her wrist.
‘All the slaves were taken up on deck to watch. The crew were twitchy, cruel with their whips if anyone moved too slow, or gave them a look they didn’t like. The captain sat apart from it all. He smoked a pipe, watching, as they tied ropes around Mama, and hoisted her into the air. I tried to reach her, but the chains made me stumble, and I was whipped. I screamed and screamed, so I wouldn’t hear Mama screaming, as the Flaxen Devil drove the nails into her hands. She lasted nearly two days up there, under the burning sun, her arms splayed like a dying bird or the dark angel to the fore. Her cries for water grew fainter, until they ceased altogether. Then they cut her down and tossed her over the side.’
Caesar John met my eye. Even he looked troubled.
Cinnamon spoke very softly: ‘The following day was when the thirst began.’
On the first day the slaves were brought up on deck as normal, fed, but not washed. The food was the same, but the water tubs were only half full. They asked for more, and they were beaten. On the second day, the water was reduced by half again.
By the sixth day, slaves were dying below decks. Cinnamon felt dizzy and sick. People were hallucinating. They pissed brown water, or not at all. Some fell on the ground, and shook with convulsions until they died. The crew threw their bodies overboard.
‘On the eighth day, when we were taken up on deck, the long-faced man patrolled the ranks of slaves. He selected the sickest. I thought they were going to be given more water, and I wished I had pretended to be sicker than I was. Then they pulled the first man towards the side of the ship. When he realized their intention, he fought them. They had to crack his fingers with a club before he would let go. I remember his scream as he fell. He disappeared when he hit the water, but I saw him come up again. He swam after the ship for nearly six hours. They killed thirty-two men, sixteen women and two children that day. Two days later, they killed seventy more.’
I didn’t want Cinnamon to go on. Neither, from the look of him, did Caesar John. He was staring at a spot on the wall. Cinnamon was still gazing at the fire. Then she resumed her story.
‘By the twelfth day, my stomach was swollen, and I had stopped passing water. I dreamed often of Mama, and sometimes when I opened my eyes, I saw her face. I knew it was impossible, because I’d watched them kill Mama. I began to suspect then that I was dying. When we were next taken up on deck, the long-faced man picked me out. They killed fifteen slaves before they came to me. I wanted to fight, but I had no strength left. My legs went from under me, and one of the men picked me up. The air burned my lungs and seemed to shimmer. I saw creatures on the deck with horns and tusks and golden eyes. Looking down at the slaves in the water below, I saw sea monsters and mermaids. A dolphin leaped, silver in the sun.
‘In my mind, I was already dead. Then I heard the captain’s voice: “Not this one. She’s one of mine. She should have been getting extra rations. I won’t be bilked, Brabazon.”
‘“Aren’t we all in this together? The weakest slaves was what we agreed.”
‘“Nobody said anything about my slaves. Take her below and put her with my others. Give her water. She’ll be worth fifty guineas to the right buyer.” They exchanged a glare. “You can write your own rules when you captain your own ship.”’
I was listening out for anything that might implicate the crew. This couldn’t be it. Vaughan wanting to protect his property at the expense of the officers’ share wouldn’t make a difference in court. It wasn’t evidence of fraud.
‘Go on,’ I said gently.
‘On the thirteenth day, when we were taken up on deck, I was kept apart from the others, together with five slaves who also belonged to the captain. Over half the slaves were gone now. The extra water hadn’t been enough to stop the hallucinations. In the food tubs, I saw tiny Africans drowning in a sea of mashed beans. I looked up at the sky, and it wasn’t blue anymo
re. It was black, as if the duppies were angry. In the clouds, I saw the faces of Mama and my ancestors. I looked down at the deck, and a coin formed in front of my eyes. Another coin formed nearby, then another and another. If I gathered all the coins together, I thought, I might have enough to purchase my freedom. I tried to pick one up, but it dissolved beneath my fingers. Then I realized the coins were falling from the sky.’
My body tensed, realizing what she’d just said. Dear God, there it was. ‘Are you saying that on the thirteenth day it rained?’ My tone was urgent. ‘How long for?’
‘A day and a night. We could hear it below decks. Our ancestors were weeping. I wanted to weep too, but I had no tears left.’
Caesar John had seen the change come over me, but he didn’t seem to understand. ‘The water tanks would have been filled by the rain,’ I said. ‘But they killed the last two batches of slaves anyway. Any ship in the vicinity will have a record of the storm in her journal. It will verify her story.’
I turned to Cinnamon. ‘Do you want others to hear this? To know what they did? Can you bear to tell it again? It must be your choice.’
She looked at me for a long moment, and then nodded.
I had promised Caro that I wouldn’t involve myself in this business again. It was also a condition of my deal with Cavill-Lawrence. But Caesar John had made no one any promises.
‘I need you to go to Lloyds coffeehouse, Pope’s Head Alley,’ I said to him. ‘Find a gentleman there named Hector Sebright. Bring him here to hear her story.’
He frowned, evidently still shaken by what he’d heard. ‘You think a gentleman’s going to go off with some Negro he’s never met?’
I glanced at Cinnamon. She still seemed to be on that ship. Her eyes were almost luminescent in the firelight.
‘Tell him it concerns a vessel he once insured, by name The Dark Angel. He’ll remember. Tell him you have one of the slaves who survived that crossing. Tell him you act as her negotiator. Tell him her story stands to make him very rich.’
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
If this were a different, better world, then the murder of Thaddeus Archer might have changed history. Hector Sebright would have won his claim against Atlantic Trading and Partners, heralding a public outcry over the drowning of the African slaves. All Napier Smith’s fears would have been realized: petitions and pamphlets, people disavowing West Indian sugar. The death knell for slavery would have been sounded.
Yet as Caro likes to say, this is the world we live in. Few people other than those who now read this manuscript have ever heard of The Dark Angel. Still less give any thought to the three hundred and six African men, women and children who were murdered aboard her over the course of seven abhorrent days in December 1778.
Hector Sebright did come to the sponging house to hear Cinnamon’s story, and he was greatly interested in what he heard. His claim against Atlantic Trading and Partners was lodged before the court of the King’s Bench only a week later. In response, the West India lobby did what they have always done when their interests have been threatened: they paid a lot of money to make the problem disappear.
To Sebright’s credit, he played a good hand well. Sensing the lobby’s desperation, he held out until the eve of his day in court, when he accepted a sum of twenty-five thousand pounds, nearly four times the amount he’d paid out on the claim. The Dark Angel sailed quietly into the annals of the nation’s secret history, a vessel of lost souls, a ship of ghosts.
In only one small respect was justice done. The West India lobby, aggrieved by the cost of the claim, took their resentment out upon John Monday. His lines of credit dried up, and he found few investors for his slaving voyages, declaring bankruptcy in the spring of 1782. He ended his days in a debtors’ prison. Mrs Monday and her children were thrown upon the mercy of the workhouse.
Monday’s last slaving voyage before the banks foreclosed, was made by The Phoenix in the autumn of 1781. She sailed without incident to the Bight of Bonny, where over four hundred African slaves were purchased, then sold in the Caribbean. On her return passage to Deptford, the ship encountered heavy weather in the north Atlantic, and went down with all hands. Among the list of the dead was the ship’s third officer, Nathaniel Grimshaw.
*
Cinnamon lives quietly now, in a little cottage west of Hampstead. Under the terms of the agreement negotiated for her by Caesar John, she received a five per cent share of the payment made to Hector Sebright. Lucius Stokes was forced to renounce all claim on her. Her freedom was confirmed by the courts. She wants for nothing, save the ability to forget.
For my part, I have sat now in Parliament for nearly a quarter century. Though high office has eluded me – due in part to the enmity of the West India lobby – some years ago I was appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade. One of my first tasks in this role was to chair the standing committee formed to consider the siting of the new West India dock.
The passage of years had not been kind to Deptford’s claim, and my committee considered the merits of only two rival propositions: the first, to enlarge the existing port of Wapping; the second, an audacious plan to cut a channel through the marshland on the Isle of Dogs. I guided the committee, and later the House of Commons, towards this latter scheme, which received royal assent in 1799. Though it played little part in my reasoning, I will own to a small measure of satisfaction that Lucius Stokes, now in his dotage, is forced to gaze upon these works every time he visits the dock at Deptford.
Finally, there is the matter of James Brabazon’s disappearance, an event at first accounted a mystery in Deptford, then later – after certain letters from Scotland were received by the mayor and the magistrate – regarded as a distasteful matter the town preferred to forget. Those who did give it any thought presumed that Brabazon had taken his own life, when he realized certain events from his past were likely to catch up with him. The truth, as is so often the case in Deptford, was rather different.
My final visit to James Brabazon’s surgery took place a few hours after the explosion of The Dark Angel, not long before my call upon Mr and Mrs Monday. I found Brabazon, like the Mondays, already awake. A large travelling trunk stood in the centre of his parlour, partially filled with clothes and other possessions.
‘Are you going away, Mr Brabazon?’ I asked.
He flashed a quick, nervous smile. ‘Just a short visit to an aunt in Weybridge.’
Professing himself appalled by my injuries, and despite the hour, he graciously consented to treat my burns. While he applied ointment and bandages, I told him about Scipio’s confession and his death.
‘That such savage acts were committed by a Negro scarcely surprises me,’ he said. ‘Those who account the black race equal to the European can have little understanding of the base nature of the African brain.’
‘He didn’t kill because he was African,’ I said. ‘He killed because slavery had destroyed his mind.’ Afraid I would lose control, and beat him to a pulp, I drew a breath and adopted a more measured tone. ‘I have been to the House of Lilies,’ I said.
A shadow seemed to pass across his face, as it had that day I’d asked him about going to Greenwich to meet Tad.
‘I will have that place closed down, even if I have to burn it to the ground myself. I cannot prove you went there, but I know you were Archer’s informant. You stole the contracts for him, and then cast the blame on Daniel Waterman. You tried to convince John Monday to have Archer killed, so he wouldn’t force you to testify in court. Monday refused, but fortune smiled on you when Scipio intervened. Not anymore.’
He started to protest his innocence.
‘Don’t.’ The force of my tone shocked him into silence. ‘The silver ticket in itself wouldn’t have been enough, I don’t think. Archer must have had more. Perhaps the ticket gave him the clue, and he subsequently made inquiries about Richard Price in Glasgow – as I have done. Was there another girl in Scotland? As young as those in Lee? Or was there more than one? Soon I�
�ll know, so you might as well tell me.’
Brabazon’s Adam’s apple bobbed. ‘It isn’t how you think. I loved her and she loved me. You need to know that our laws are based upon a flawed understanding of science. In many parts of the world, girls are wed at seven and eight. If they are mature for their age, there is no medical case against it.’
Listening to his justifications, my curiosity swiftly evaporated. ‘Just tell me one thing: was it your idea to drown the slaves? I ask because from everything I have heard about Vaughan and his state of mind, I cannot imagine it originating with him. It would need a clever, scientific brain to conceive of something quite so wicked.’
He just sat there, looking at me, and in the end, I lost patience.
‘Well, perhaps by the time you return from Weybridge, I will have heard back from my Scottish correspondents. Maybe then you will be more forthcoming with your answers.’
In the years afterwards, I often wondered if I did the right thing. Many will say that Brabazon should have been tried for his crimes in a court of law – both against the little girls and the drowned slaves. Yet at that point, I had no evidence to have him arrested on either count, and I feared that Brabazon would simply disappear as he had disappeared before, emerging in some new town under a new name.
Even if I had later caught up with him, and laid charges against him, I had my doubts. Juries are capricious creatures, and I had experienced Brabazon’s persuasive mendacity for myself. I could well imagine him talking a courtroom round to his way of thinking. Or as Caesar John might put it, the law can be a cunt.
The High Street outside Brabazon’s rooms was bathed in the pale half-light of pre-dawn. A few yards further on, I turned into an alley with a good view of his front door. Jamaica Mary was waiting there, a bedraggled, black crow in her cloak and hood. Behind her loomed two muscular figures: Abraham and another black footman I didn’t recognize.
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